Anthem is a beautiful car that is an absolute joy to drive, but so far, it only has enough gas to get you a couple miles. Also, the wheels will periodically fall off. Sold as a live-service game, fans of Anthem’s exhilarating gameplay have to hold out hope that things will improve, but there’s no denying the initial expedition was rough.

Anthem is not a bad game as a whole, but rather an interesting project with wasted potential. It has really great gameplay mechanics and an awesome setting that, sadly, was negatively affected by bad choices and poorly-implemented ideas like a forgettable story with a horrible narrative, repetitive mission structures, painful loading screens and a multiplayer approach with null sense of cooperation.

As much as I personally wanted Anthem to be a runaway success, it ends up delivering an inconsistent experience that constantly waivers between mediocre and excellent.

This is what Anthem is like as a whole: a game where promising moments are bookended by frustration, where good ideas are undone before they can be fully realized.

I will probably fire up Anthem more than a few times again, if only to experience the joyous nature of plopping down a Colossus in the middle of a firefight and unfurling fiery, shelled death upon the landscape. It's a wonderful distraction. But unfortunately, Anthem doesn't look like anything more than that. I can't recommend it.

Anthem is gorgeous to look at and can be fun in places, but for now it feels decidedly half-baked.

It’s this user-unfriendly design that colors so much of Anthem”as “work.” Loading into a random quickplay mission only to be met with an objective lacking any in-world waypoint or trigger to progress imbues “Anthem” with the kind of high drama normally reserved for filing an invoice with a new company.